22 February 2015

Crowded House at Karekare

“In a long forgotten place / Who’ll be
the first to run?” – ‘Kare Kare’

The band was eager to get started on
the follow-up to Woodface. It was time to cut the umbilical cord
with Mitchell Froom. When Woodface was released, Neil
expressed disappointment that the band playing live were that much ‘wilder’
than they were on record, where all the concentration was on getting the
arrangements and structures right. ‘One day we’ll get into the studio and get
across some of the tangents,’ he promised.

Neil describes Froom as ‘very much the
classic producer’: he was a musician, who worked well on arrangements, was
conscientious and never short of an opinion. ‘That was great for me to
encounter. I’d never struck somebody who was that fully rounded as a producer.
But, after three records, we felt – and he did, too – that we needed to define
ourselves outside his influence. We were looking for somebody completely
different, whose personality would inspire us to be looser and experiment. We
wanted to work with somebody wild, whatever that means.’

London-based Capitol A&R man David
Field got to know both Finn brothers in 1992, developing a rapport with Tim
during the protracted recording of Before & After. Then, while
Crowded House was on its lengthy tour of Britain in the northern summer, he
acted as the go-between in the search for a new producer. He introduced a
variety of candidates for the job to Neil, and escorted them to the band’s gigs
throughout the country. Among those considered were Steve Lillywhite, Gil
Norton and John Leckie. They would hear the new songs the band included in
their set, and afterwards would discuss their ideas with Neil.

Field says that towards the end of the
tour, after seven or eight meetings, he had a clear idea of what Neil was
looking for. ‘I had this Youth idea. I’d met him and knew he was a character.
He hadn’t really done anything that was relevant, but I thought, this could be
really interesting.’

Born Martin Glover, South London wide
boy Youth first came to notice as the founding bass-player in the
uncompromising art-punk band Killing Joke (whose leader, Jaz Coleman, had
settled in New Zealand). After leaving the group in 1982, he won respect as a
producer/re-mixer, working with techno, dance and pop acts such as Brilliant,
PM Dawn, Blue Pearl and the Orb. At the time he was approached by Crowded
House, he had recently received his second consecutive nomination for producer
of the year in the British record industry awards.

Field took the band to meet Youth in
Brixton, where he has a couple of small studios in his house. The night before,
Youth had held a summer solstice rave, so the garden was all trampled. ‘Things
were a little sombre in the studio that morning, a little delicate,’ says Paul
Hester. ‘We met him in the front room, sat down, had a coffee and proceeded to
talk. It’s early, and he’s rolling joints the whole time, so we were all quite
impressed. I thought, he’s like Neil from The Young Ones. He just
rambled on and it just sounded like fun: this guy’s into a whole different
thing. Let’s do what he wants to do. We weren’t too sure what that really was.’

Field says Youth was his ‘usual cryptic
self’, but whetted the band’s curiosity. Driving away, ‘the conversation in the
car was along the lines of, ‘You’re fucking mad! The guy’s wacky. But
interesting. Did you see the size of that spliff? What was he going on about?’

‘Youth had heard a few of the new songs
on tape, liked the music, and his ideas fitted exactly into what Neil had been
thinking. Youth said he didn’t want to think about it too much: ‘I want to
explore’. It was all very vague, suggesting we concentrate on atmosphere and
rhythm and texture.’

Although nothing Youth had done in
music suggested it was a good idea, something clicked straight away, says Neil.
‘He’s got a pretty nutty approach and attitude to things, and a great record
collection. And he said some good things about music and passion, the sort of
intensity he likes in music. So we took a punt on him.’

Youth’s persona is very theatrical,
says Field. Seeing him connecting with Neil Finn was like ‘the existentialist
meets the sceptic. It was definitely two extremes, and the challenge was how
they treated it, how they could bend each other in certain ways.’ Neil’s
scepticism came out during a dinner, when Youth was waving a crystal above
people’s hands. Neil saw Youth’s hand moving, not the crystal, and expressed
his doubts. ‘What about Stonehenge?’ said Youth.

Club-hound Nick had most in common with
Youth’s musical tastes, although he couldn’t stand Killing Joke. ‘But I didn’t
associate him with the band. I thought of him as being a bass player, of about
the same age, who was influenced by a lot of the same music in the late 70s and
early 80s.’

Mark says they chose Youth because ‘he
was the most outrageous. He was the one who fitted the bill the least. As far
as being a competent nuts-and-bolts producer, he was up in the stars somewhere.
And that appealed to them in many ways, because Mitchell is very much a
tight-fisted, cracking-the-whip kind of guy. With Youth, it’s like ‘making a
record should be like ... making a journey’. He had all these little sayings,
plus a really cool record collection, and they really hit it off. They all
smoke a prodigious amount of pot, and I think this all led to some kind of
camaraderie.’

The other chance element in the
experiment was the recording location. Neil wanted to avoid spending weeks in a
sterile studio – be it in Los Angeles, London or anywhere – and realised that
he had never done any serious recordings in New Zealand. During the April 1992
tour he sensed a positive mood in the country, then just emerging from a
recession. He told BBC’s Radio One, ‘I just looked longingly at the country and
thought, damn it – this is a really inspiring place, why don’t we record here?’

When they couldn’t find a studio in New
Zealand that appealed to them, they decided to rent a house and set up their
own. They headed for the secluded, windswept coast 45 minutes west of Auckland:
Karekare Beach. Few people live at Karekare, even though Auckland city is a
commutable distance away. Nestled in the side of a hill like a gun-metal grey
bunker is the home of Nigel Horrocks, who designed and built it in the style of
an open-plan studio suitable for performances. A floor-to-ceiling window slides
back so the large living room is open to a southern view of the valley. A
10-minute walk along a bush track over the brow of the hill leads to a dramatic
black-sand surf beach.

Horrocks – an enigmatic dilettante whom
Nick Seymour describes as ‘a Himalayas-climbing, Nepalese-loving ethnocentric
chap’ – was well disposed to the idea of renting his unique home for use as a
recording studio. During the filming of The Piano, it had been the
base of actor Harvey Keitel. Scattered inside the spacious living room is a
variety of Pacific instruments that Horrocks has collected since childhood.

Crowded House took up residence in the
Karekare valley. They rented a couple of houses for accomodation, and Horrocks’s
forbidding home was set up for recording. Luckily, a new studio called Revolver
was in the process of being built in Auckland. So with all their equipment in
disarray, the studio didn’t take too much convincing to hire it out. The old
Neve console and 24-track Ampex tape-recorder, plus crates of effects racks and
vintage microphones and a baby grand piano were put on a truck and driven over
the narrow, winding road to the west coast.

Horrocks’s house was across a creek and
up a steep, treacherous gravel drive. In the recent winter the creek had
flooded, swallowing the four-wheel drive Subaru of Horrocks’s mother. ‘So I
thought it was time to stop being a romantic, and having a ford across the
creek, and get started building a bridge,’ he says. The band chipped in, as a
crane was needed to get the equipment into the house. ‘There wouldn’t be many
albums that have had a bridge-building/roading component in the budget,’ says
Grant Thomas. Horrocks’s neighbours built a movable wall for the large living
room, to separate the control room from the recording space. The main bedroom
was used as a tape store and editing suite, McAndrew slept in another bedroom
so he could keep an eye on the equipment at night, and a small room became the
vocal booth. ‘They had booths built all around the house,’ says Horrocks. ‘Out
in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the laundry. There was an incredible tangle
of cables and equipment lying around.’

Arriving before Youth were his engineer
Greg Hunter and programmer Matt Austin, who had flown from the congested grime
of Brixton, South London. They were badly sunburnt from a brief stopover in
Bali. Now, they found themselves in a tranquil, lush South Pacific valley. It
was a bit of a shock. ‘They looked like Dickensian waifs, punks from London,’
says Hester. ‘Long, thin hair, pale skin, sunburn, no shoes or socks. They’d
arrived at this little house in Karekare, and were going, ‘Where the fuck are
we? What have we done?’

The band recorded six days a week for
two months, quickly settling into a haphazard routine. The conscientious pair –
Neil and Mark – would arrive at the studio at about 11am, then wait an hour or
two for the others to arrive and start making tea. ‘It was maddening, but you
had to fall into this schedule we’d carved out for ourselves,’ says Mark Hart.

Early on in the sessions, Mark wrote in
his journal:

December 3, ’92 – Thursday. Neil asked
me not to go on tour with Suzanne Vega today. He says I’m part of Crowded House
now and that I shouldn’t have to do those kind of things. Nick’s doing bass
overdubs on ‘Nails in Your Feet’. I took a walk up to the falls. It’s very
beautiful. Did keyboard overdubs. Started about 5.30pm.

As the days went by, they would start
later – and finish later, not getting to bed till four o’clock some mornings. ‘It
got shifted to this weird zone where we were playing a lot at night,’ says
Paul. The band’s recording method changed. They worked up songs from lengthy
jam sessions, having more say over their own parts.

The band lived in a house owned by John
and Stephanie Lindeman, about a quarter of a mile away, high on a ridge
overlooking the sea. At about nine o’clock each evening everyone would take a
break and return to the Lindeman’s, where a catered meal would be ready. The
dining room has a panoramic view, and the band, crew and their entourage would
watch the sun go down and the waves sweep in, surrounded by ancient art from
Tibet. (Lindeman and Horrocks had run an adventure company in the Himalayas
together.) The evening meals grew into social events, with guests usually
invited for dinner. Youth would hold court, put on Cat Stevens’s Tea
for the Tillerman, and expound on primeval belief systems, exotic cultures,
mass hypnosis and the tribal nature of mankind – or just plain storytelling –
while the red wine flowed and joints kept appearing. ‘It was very convincing,’
says Mark, ‘but sometimes you felt he was improvising a lot.’ Slowly the others
would peel themselves away from the intense philosophical discussions, and make
their way back to the studio.

The after-dinner walk was an
exhilarating time of day, the band and crew feeling their way through native
bush along a dirt track in the pitch dark. ‘We’d try and get back without using
a torch,’ says Paul. ‘It was scary because we’d walk along the side of this
hill, with a sheer drop beside the track. It was great.

‘One night we all got back to the
studio and were all mooching around with cups of tea getting ready for the
evening session and – there’s no Youth! No one had seen Youth. He’d been behind
us on the track. So Youth had stumbled off on his own without a torch somewhere
in the bush. We waited another half hour and then he finally showed up, covered
head-to-tail in dirt and with a big stick in his hand. He’d gone over the side
in the dark and grabbed this branch to stop his fall. He had used it to walk
along the track and finally found his way back to the studio. He was totally
shaken: ‘Oh man, I was lost in the darkness, this stick saved my life, man.’
For the rest of the album, he always had the stick with him – his sacred stick.’

Youth – the pagan/Celtic voyager – took
to the area’s primal atmosphere immediately. He would walk around barefoot,
encouraging everyone to ‘Take your shoes off, man – feel the path with your
mind.’

Paul eventually got on well with Youth,
after ‘the requisite early altercation,’ he says. ‘It was a domestic issue,
which I had to raise, being the Mum of the house.’ (The argument – about
ashtrays and housework – led to the lines ‘We left a little dust / On his
Persian rug’ in ‘Kare Kare’.)

Paul liked Youth’s spirit, his
intuitive way of working. ‘That’s what we wanted to do and he certainly
provided a lot of that. Sometimes you wondered, ‘Is this complete shit?’ but
you have to read between the lines with Youth. You don’t take it all literally.
He’s also a mongrel for a joint and so am I.’

According to Mark, the main difference
in the recording of Together Alone was ‘it was a real band
effort. Everybody had their say. It’s the way bands should be.’ Youth’s
contribution would be not so much arrangement in a literal sense, more an orchestration
of the dynamics, conducting the spirit of the sessions with his enthusiasm. ‘He
definitely steered things in a completely opposite direction,’ says Hester. ‘Black
and White Boy’ is an example. When written, it had an almost bossa-nova groove,
with a smooth soul melody. ‘Youth just took that one to another place: More
buzz man, turn the guitar up. More fuzz, Neil – heavy. Yeah, heavy.
Less notes, Nick – just that note, the whole way. All the way!

‘He was set up in the lounge room on a
few pillows wrapped in his sari, with his ashtrays and his pot and his coffee
and his books. He always had a novel on the go. So there would be this reading
and rolling, then stopping to tell someone to turn their guitar up full. More
of everything! And he would dance during takes, with headphones on. He
would come up to you and conduct, just wave his arms at you and scream, Freak
out, man, freak out! More! More!

‘It was like a happening. It was great,
totally the reverse from Mitch and Tchad. We would freak out and they’d say, ‘That
was pretty good. Maybe you should come in and listen to it.’ Instead we got, ‘Man,
that was sublime ... a paradox of rock.’

Paul says Youth had a talent for
setting up atmospheres in which the band could capture certain feels or work
within. Then, he’d suggest other instruments to use. ‘But once we started
playing and jamming, he just let us go. Because he’d been in a band, he
understood there were times to let us get on with it. If he wanted to make a
suggestion, he’d put his hand up.’ The band got used to Youth hippie-dancing in
front of them as they recorded a take, headphones on, conducting. Meanwhile,
Hunter would be headbanging behind the mixing desk, having fun turning up the
volume and continually blowing speakers, creating ‘Zen mixes’ in which only
four knobs on the desk could be turned up at any one time.

Youth could recognise the character of
the band and play with it, says Paul, ‘introducing folklore and games to build
up the band’s spirit. I think he was subconsciously into that.’ The mood
created, the band was free to explore and run with it. Such an occasion brought
about ... Nude Night.

The exhilaration created by Karekare
inspired the cathartic disrobing in the sessions for ‘In My Command’. ‘We
wanted to be immersed in it somehow,’ says Paul. The band had been playing a
few takes that didn’t seem to be going anywhere. ‘It was like we needed to jump
in a cold bath and get out and do one.’ On the way back from dinner, Paul suggested
the answer was to shed their inhibitions with their clothes.

‘I thought we’d go nude, run around the
house a couple of laps, then stand on the hill and howl and scream at the moon
for a bit. Then we’d record a take. So that’s what we did. But I remember Mark
Hart farting around ...’

‘Me, Neil and Nick were nude within
about a second, ready to go, and Mark was diligently taking off his trackshoes
and socks, then putting his shoes back on – to run outside. He was being
sensible, and we were going, Mark – we’re having a wild, abandoned
moment here. Don’t get sensible. What are you doing? And he’s going, ‘I-I-I’m
putting my shoes on.’ We almost lost the moment. Nude, you have to
act on it. You can’t be dilly-dallying, and Mark had this doubt about his
nudeness. Eventually we got him out there.’

‘So there we were,’ says Mark. ‘Neil
playing keyboard, me playing guitar. Everything strategically placed. Of
course, the real hippies – Youth and Greg – wouldn’t have anything to do with
it, being British and modest. They couldn’t take their clothes off, even though
they were adhering to this whole hippie philosophy. We played the song once,
then all ran outside for some fresh air. It was like being stupid boys. Then we
came back in, played it again a couple of times. But we didn’t use
those tracks! There might have been a bit of self-consciousness that
you could detect. We ended up keeping a track we cut before dinner. It was
funny – but we tried.’
They ended up listening to the takes – still nude – in front of the
mixing console. ‘It was great,’ says Paul, ‘we were all smiling, and someone
snapped a couple of photos from behind: the true arseholes of Crowded House.’

Youth’s experimental recording methods
reflected his pagan spirituality. On ‘Pineapple Head’ he asked Mark to stand in
a circle of volcanic stones while recording a guitar part. He obliged,
stretching his leads 100 metres from the desk to the stone circle sited on the
hill above the house, playing an ambient guitar part. Youth then gave Paul his
instructions for recording the vocal.

It was at this point that Parlophone
promotions manager Malcolm Hill, visiting from London, happened to call by to
check out the exotic location. ‘When I got there, they were going along with
everything Youth suggested,’ he says. ‘As I arrived, Paul was sitting in an
upright flight case, holding in his arms lots of crystals, singing backing
vocals. I said to him, what the hell are you doing? He whispered to me, ‘Well,
Youth wants me to. He’s barking mad, but we’re getting some great results.’
There was a lot of wackiness going on, but it was very funny.’

With the A&R direction coming from
David Field, who was based in London, executives at Capitol in Los Angeles were
concerned about the anarchic sessions, possibly fanned by the scepticism of
American manager Gary Stamler. Field was asked, were things out of control? ‘From
day one everyone at the label in America was adamant that Youth was the wrong
choice,’ says Field. ‘I was confident that things were fine. But it was a huge
amount of pressure, a big responsibility for me, as I’d never worked with a
band of that size before. It was a non-stop battle. So I felt I should go down to
New Zealand and see how things were panning out. The responsibility for
introducing Youth to the band was mine and my career would have suffered badly
if things had gone terribly wrong.’

Field arrived at Karekare a day earlier
than scheduled and found ‘all sorts of strange stuff going on’. Many of those
present were in a psychedelic frame of mind. Mark, who remained straight (‘It’s
easy for me to be giddy when I’m around a bunch of giddy people’) says Field
seemed rather stunned by the scene. ‘I remember him not reacting very
enthusiastically. He was taken aback. I don’t think he disliked it, but it was
such a weird world to enter. Somehow we had developed this setting which we
were very used to, but anyone coming into it from the outside world was surprised.’

But to Field, the music he heard coming
out of the monitors was ‘very, very exciting. An absolute thrill. I knew it was
a serious departure – I thought, ‘My god, what are people going to make of
this?’ – but I felt it was exactly what they needed to be doing. It was
adventurous, dynamic, so textured and atmospheric – much like Karekare itself,
really. The place is very influential on the record.’

Mark says that occasionally he would
get frustrated at the lack of progress being made – ‘We’d just be getting ready
to do something and a thunderstorm would roll in’ – but then he realised, ‘We
were under the influence of the project: we weren’t controlling it, it was
controlling us.’ Although Neil had most of the central ideas before they
started recording, they started to change in character. Songs that were
particularly affected by the climate at Karekare include ‘Fingers of Love’,
recorded on a rain swept, melancholy day; similarly ‘Distant Sun’, with Nick
and Paul in separate rooms inside the house, while Neil and Mark played
acoustic guitars on the porch shrouded by a cold mist; ‘Private Universe’
changed from a swing song to a panoramic guitar wash; and of course ‘Kare Kare’,
credited to all the band because it emerged during a jam.

December 4, ’92 – Friday. Because of
technical difficulties we didn’t really start playing until late afternoon,
even though we got to the studio at noon. Some TV guys from Auckland came
around and we did an impromptu interview. Started work on the ‘Newcastle Jam’
but gave up and went to ’Black & White Boy’ which changed
dramatically over the course of the day. It’s now two electric guitars.

Both the physical and emotional climate
at Karekare were always extreme, says Paul. ‘Every day there was something
going on, as people settled into the joint. They’d go off for walks and have
these intense things happen. A lot of stuff has gone down in that area of New
Zealand, and I think that rubbed off on us. The Maori folklore really made
sense and we would dream about it at night.

‘I remember Neil coming back from a
walk and saying, ‘I went up to the ridge, round to that mountain, there’s an
amazing waterfall and this rock pool. I took all my clothes off and jumped in,
screamed at the top of my voice.’ He was totally exhilarated with it, like he’d
done an est course or something. Things like that were happening – it was very
volatile.’

Nick describes recording Together
Alone as a ‘humbling experience, being in an area of the world so
geographically dynamic and so incredibly removed from popular culture’. For
Paul, that meant the penance of having no television to watch; for the British
visitors, all sorts of luxuries they took for granted in cosmopolitan Brixton.
Guitar tech Dugald found himself inundated with requests if he was making the
20-minute trip to Henderson, the closest town. ‘Everybody would be aware he’d
be going, and they’d say, ‘Oh good, he can get some supplies.’ This was very
evident with the Poms, they were very separated from life,’ says Paul. ‘They’d
be saying, ‘Oh, Dugald, can you get me some fags, can you get me some incense,
can you get me a visa for India?’

‘Poor old Dugald, he had to do it all,’
says Mark. ‘He was our lifeline to the outside world. ‘Oh Dugald, are you going
into town? Can you take this sample of, ah ... shit to the doctor?’

Neil had caught giardia from the local
drinking water and, by the end of the sessions, weighed only 57 kilos. ‘It took
a toll on Neil,’ says Paul. ‘He was the man on the spot. There were all sorts
of things to deal with: who was going to live where, for example. Everyone
wanted their own space.’

‘It was quite tough,’ agrees Neil. ‘It
was a weird combination of people and there was quite a bit of stress around.
But there were a lot of really good things about it too. There were very good
days where we made some good music. But it was torturous to some degree.’

As the weeks dragged on in the intense
environment, energy became drained and tempers frayed. ‘Towards the end, Youth
wasn’t functioning particularly well, but then I’m pretty relentless,’ says
Neil. He started to feel he was being taken advantage of by Youth (‘He was on a
pretty good wicket, he got to go out to the other side of the world, smoke a
massive amount of pot, was very well paid ... there was a cynical edge to it’),
and by hangers-on outside of the band enjoying the lifestyle. ‘I regard the
experience as a loss of innocence. It brought a lot of hostile things to the
surface.’

Despite their differences, Neil
describes Youth as ‘charming and intelligent’. Having Youth as producer meant
they were less ‘pedantic about the details’ of what they were doing. ‘That’s
what we wanted, and I wanted more of it. In the end, he was quite conservative
with us. I was hoping he’d really challenge us, but he still made quite a ‘Crowded
House-y’ record with us. I don’t think he really wanted to be the known as the
guy who screwed up Crowded House.

‘The album sounds really good in
hindsight, it turned out really well. So in a way you can’t knock Youth.
Whatever he did, somehow it worked.’

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A rough mix of 'Black and White Boy' is here. You can buy Something So Strong as an ebook via Amazon, or one of the few remaining print copies from the author here.

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the book

This blog about Crowded House is written by the author of the definitive biography of the band, Something So Strong(Pan Macmillan Australia, 1997).Meanwhile, visit my website for more information, articles, and details of how the purchase Something So Strong.

the author

writer, journalist, editor, music historian and radio producer. Music journalism and book reviews from the past can be read at www.chrisbourke.co.nz
For items relating to Blue Smoke, go to www.bluesmoke.net.nz